Subject: MIME

From: Pau Gorostiza <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 1997 20:43:39 +0000

Hi, I'm using PINE 3.93 for Linux. Does anybody know how to send
messages in MIME format ? I mean to send accents and Latin1 characters
through a listserver but it seems that Pine is using UUENCODE and they
end up looking quite ugly...

Thanks in advance,
                       Pau

-- 
Pau Gorostiza
[email-masked]
http://tam-tam.sct.ub.es 

Serveis Científico-Tècnics
Universitat de Barcelona
(34-3) 402-1349, 1352

---

From: Mike Brudenell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Jan 1997 09:28:37 +0000 (GMT)

Hi!

I believe I'm right in saying that Pine doesn't know anything about
UUencode at all.  Instead it uses the standard MIME character encoding
techniques: Quoted Printable and Base64.

Quoted Printable is used for the Message Text, when there are a few (less
than 5%?) non-US-ASCII characters present.  The rest of the Message Text
is in clear text.

A character encoded in Quoted Printable becomes "=XX", where "XX" are the
two hexadecimal characters representing its character code.

Obviously mapping a single character to three isn't terribly efficient
when there are lots of them.  So if the Message Text contains a
significant proportion of non-US-ASCII characters the entire Message Text
is converted to Base64 encoding, which is not directly readable by humans
(at least, none that I know!;-)

Any files attached to a message using Pine are _always_ encoded in this
way.

Another trigger involves Message Text with overly long lines.  I think the
breakpoint is about 1,000 characters(ish), but can't remember whether this
triggers Quoted Printable or Base64.  I _think_ the latter.

When a message contains Quoted Printable or Base64 encoded text this
should be clear from the headers.  For example, the message you sent out
containing your question included some accented characters, and included
these headers:

	Content-type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
	Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable

The latter signifies that the message includes Quoted Printable items.
These will be decoded again by recipients' mail programs.  The former
header identifies which character set was in use by the sender's mailer.
If a recipient's Pine is set up to use a different character set then it
will give a warning at the start of the message when it is viewed.

So basically Pine is _already_ using MIME encoding.  The fact you aren't
seeing it once the articles have passed through the list server may
indicate a problem with it or its configuration.

You can test this by sending a message from Pine to yourself and seeing
what it looks like.  Then try sending a similar message through the list
server.  If the first works but the latter is garbled then the finger
tends to point at the list server.

Try checking the headers of problem messages you receive relayed through
the list server.  (You can do this using Pine's "H" (Full Headers)
command.  If Pine complains that this is not a valid command you will
first need to set the "enable-full-header-cmd" option in the Setup
Configuration screen.)

Finally, you may not know that Pine 3.95 is the current version of Pine
(and has been for a while now).  You may like to mention this to whoever
looks after Pine on your computer system and see if they can be persuaded
to upgrade.

Cheers,

-- 
Mike Brudenell                                         <[email-masked]>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Computing Service, University of York, Heslington, York, YO1 5DD, UK
Tel: +44-1904-433811  FAX: +44-1904-433740  http://www.york.ac.uk/~pmb1/

---

From: "James P. Meyer" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Jan 1997 11:03:31 -0500

> triggers Quoted Printable or Base64.  I _think_ the latter.

	The pine system here at Duke seems to just wrap long lines.  I 
accidently specified a binary file instead of a text file when I wanted 
to read a file into the body of a message.  The system complained about 
the long lines and said it was wrapping them.  What showed up on my 
terminal screen after that certainly *looked* like straight binary and 
not some conversion.  It was *not* a pretty sight.  8-)

	Jim